


Temet Nosce

by Jarakrisafis



Category: Transformers Generation One, Transformers: Shattered Glass
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-11-13
Updated: 2011-11-13
Packaged: 2017-10-26 01:34:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,080
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/277102
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jarakrisafis/pseuds/Jarakrisafis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Halloween is possibly not the best time to get to know your darker side.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Temet Nosce

“Not going to the Halloween party Ratchet?”

The medbot leaning against the other side of Wheeljack’s workbench waved a red painted hand in dismissal. “I have better things to be doing with my night than listen to bots trying to out do each other with scary stories.”

Wheeljacks headfins flashed an amused orange as he fiddled with something inside his latest project. “Afraid the younglings will give you a bad recharge cycle?”

“I doubt they could manage that. Though I’m sure I’ll have to tweak some of their coding so they can cycle down after they frighten themselves.”

“Even Prime’s going.” Ratchet merely raised an optical brow at Wheeljacks latest attempt to convince him to attend. “I just need to finish a couple more connections and then I’m done for the night. We don’t have to go listen to the stories, just come in for a drink?”

The medic cycled the atmosphere in his venting system as he made the mistake of looking up at Wheeljack and the pleading expression on his exposed faceplates. “Fine, I’ll go, just for a couple of drinks though, and none of the Halloween nonsense.”

Wheeljack grinned before closing his mask and turning back to his device, quickly splicing the last few wires into place.

“I’m done.” Ratchet shook his helm as Wheeljack all but bounced out of the lab and into the corridor his voice floating back into the lab. “Come on Ratchet. We’ll never get there at your pace.”

Ratchet was about to reply when a faint whine caught his attention, muting his vocaliser he tilted his helm, optics widening as he placed the source of the slowly increasing noise.

He flung himself at the doorway as the innocent seeming experiment behind him sent out a pulse of energy before falling ominously quiet as it simply disintegrated, disappearing as if it had never been. Ratchet had a moment to notice that the lab benches were wavering before vanishing before he hit a wall. A very solid and very real wall. Static filled his vision as he slipped into stasis.

* * *

“Oh good, you’re still online.” Ratchet yelped as he booted up his optics and found himself staring into a pair of scarlet optics barely a hand span away from his face.

“I would ask how you got into my store room, but I think I can already guess that.” The other mech smirked as he pulled away.

“I have no idea how I got here, Decepticon, but I will tell you nothing.”

“Decepticon?” The other mech laughed. “Sorry to disappoint but I’m all Autobot.” One hand casually brushed over the purple insignia etched onto his chassis.

Purple?

Ratchet frowned as he tried to sit up, but the other mech held him down, all but sitting on his legs.

“Oh come on, you have to have some idea.” The turquoise mech said as he gestured to his own frame. “You’re looking but you’re not seeing.”

Ratchet felt his processor slow to a stop as he did as the other mech asked.

“You’re me.”

“Ooooh, give the mech an energon treat. You got it.” A maroon hand tapped his bright red brand. “Weird to see that in ‘Con colours. You’re not going to be like Cliffjumper are you?” The mech finally stood up, offering a hand to his counterpart. “He was as soft embered as any Decepticon.”

Ratchet took the hand that was offered as he shook his helm, until he could find a way back into his own dimension, and didn’t that sound strange, he would have to play along. The reports that Cliffjumper had handed in did not bode well for his survival if he didn’t.

“Not much of a speaker, ah well, anyway, since there’s two of us, call me Ratch, we don’t want to confuse ourselves.”

The newly dubbed Ratch turned back to the piles of scrap that were littering the room, “I’m giving a few of the slaggers out there upgrades. Not that they’ll thank me, ungrateful glitches the lot of them.”

“I see.” Ratchet said as he watched the green mech all but disappear into one of the heaps as he rummaged through it.

“Aha. Found it.” Ratch said as he pulled his upper half out of the scrap, what appeared to be a tangle of torn wires and plating in his hand. “Come on, it’ll be a change to have some help in here for once.”

“You don’t have an apprentice?” Ratchet asked as he trailed Ratch back to the medical bay.

“Well, I have First Aid, but he usually ends up experimenting on my patients instead of upgrading them. Here we are.”

The room was almost identical to his medbay, clean and tidy, except around a couple of berths which held stasis locked mechs, and a third which held a very black, very slagged off Ironhide, who would have murdered the turquoise medic if looks could kill.

“Oh don’t mind him.” Ratch said, “I turned his vocaliser off ages ago, and I can guarantee that the chains will hold.” The medic deflated slightly with a sad rattle of his armour. “Optimus won’t let me upgrade his cannons. They would have been much better, but no, all I’m allowed to do is repair him.”

Ironhide’s smirk was clearly victorious, until a deactivated laser scalpel bounced off his helm and Ratch stalked over. “Keep that up and I’ll turn up your pain receptors when I fix you.”

“Shouldn’t you be turning them off?” Ratchet asked as he swept the snarling truck with a medical scan.

Ratch’s bemused stare met his as the other medic cocked his helm to one side, “Why would I want to do that?”

Ratchet managed to withhold his immediate response; that medics don’t cause unnecessary suffering, and managed to come up with something less likely to get himself on a berth being ‘upgraded’ by his clearly insane counterpart. “So they don’t move around and make the damage even worse.”

"Pffft. If they can’t hold still then they deserve the extra pain. What I can’t stand is all that whining and pleading as I change things. Most of the time I just offline their vocalisers so they don’t scream at me.”

“I prefer it if they don’t move, it makes my job take twice as long and I have better things to do.” Ratchet said as he kept his helm down, ignoring the way Ironhide flinched as he brought his various tools out of subspace.

No wonder Cliffjumper had been so traumatised when he returned, this place was like a bad nightmare, and he was being forced to play along, to pretend that he didn’t care for the mech currently in his care, to act like the monster that was on the other side of the berth.

He still wore the medical symbols given out my Iacon Academy for completing medical training, how could he not care about his patients? Well, obviously he didn’t, not if the smirk that was covering his faceplates as he roughly patched up armour, and taped up cables and fluid lines was any indication.

Ratchet ducked his helm again, concentrating on repairing the damage on his side, forcing himself to ignore the way the black mech was trembling beneath his tools.

“Done. Get your aft out before I decide to go ahead with my upgrades.” Ratch said as he rebooted the vocaliser and undid the chains. The black van grunted as he swung himself off the berth, cannons whirring with a suppressed whine as he glared at the medic before he left.

“Nice repair work, but you’re like Hook, the slagging perfectionist, half of that could have been left you know.” Ratchet shrugged as his insane half didn’t seem to want an answer as he wandered over to one of the other berths and stared at its occupant. “I was just trying to decide what to do when ‘Hide came in and then you dropped out of nowhere. By the way, Prime said I can keep you, so you don’t have to worry. So, what do you think?”

“What do I think?” Ratchet asked as he moved over to the berth, not sure that Prime letting his counterpart take charge of him was the best option.

“I’m thinking a second set of optics. Or possibly a tail. That would be a real challenge, but I think I have the parts for it.”

“A tail?” Ratchet echoed as he glanced down at the mech on the berth. With the change in colouring he couldn’t be sure, but it appeared to be Huffer.

Ratch nodded with a quick smile at his counterpart as he rolled the offline mech over. “Why wouldn’t he want a tail? Not many mechs have tails; he’d be almost one of a kind.”

He jogged over to the far wall, retrieving the laser scalpel that he had thrown at Ironhide not long before, flicking it on and ramping up the power until the incandescent blade became a pure white; hot enough to slice through a mechs armour.

The not-medic waved the blade in front of Ratchet’s optics. “Well, you going to help or not?”

“Aren’t you going to ask if he wants a tail?”

Ratch blinked, his optics flickering several times as he processed the question, his faceplates showing genuine confusion, before he stepped over to the inert chassis. “No.”

The laser scalpel whined as the metal beneath it gave way, exposing Huffer’s spinal struts and cables. “Trust me, he’ll probably complain about it when he wakes up, but I’m sure he’ll realise eventually that I only did him a favour.”

Ratchet offlined his optics for a moment, forcibly rewriting coding to stop his roiling tanks from expelling what little energon they contained as the turquoise mech hummed, pulling out wires at the base of his patients back.

There was nothing medical about this. Even his universe Hook wouldn’t do something so, so barbaric, so unethical. It was like the medic was playing his own little game, only his pawns were real mechs.

Ratchet shook his helm as he retreated until his back hit the wall, staring at the mech wearing his face, amused red optics meeting his horrified blue. What if he wasn’t even in another universe? What if this was just his processors way of showing him his darker side?

His fingers scrabbled against the wall as the turquoise mech put the scalpel down and stalked towards him. “I should have guessed you’d be like the little minibot, all righteous slag and greater good talk. But I’m sure I can help you with that.”

Air beneath one hand had him sliding along the wall, all but falling into the corridor, stumbling back into the storeroom, into what should have been Wheeljacks lab.

He needed to find that device.

The sound of his own laughter coming from another vocaliser made him whirl round to find Ratch stood in the doorway with a smirk adorning his faceplates. He seemed to glide across the room as Ratchet frantically backed away until he tripped over a pile of junk, his helm impacting the floor with a crack that had his processor throwing up warnings.

“You can run, but you can’t hide.” A maroon hand reached out for Ratchet’s shoulder, the green medic’s expression turning confused, and then annoyed, as his hand didn’t make contact but passed through like smoke before Ratchets vision turned white as his processor enacted an emergency shut down.

* * *

“Ratchet? Ratchet wake up.”

“Jack?” A red hand clamped around a white arm hard enough to dent.

“Ouch, yes. Who else would I be?” Wheeljack retracted his mask as he leant over the medic “You ok? You weren’t behind me and I come back in here to find you laid out flat on your aft and with a nice dent in your helm.”

“I... I’m fine, just need to refuel.” The medic said as he clambered to his feet, his stabilising systems responding sluggishly to his command to reboot, leaving the room spinning for a long moment as they reset.

“Right.” Wheeljack didn’t look convinced as Ratchet looked around warily, his gaze fixing on the unfinished spacebridge experiment. “You sure you’re fine?”

The medic reached out a hand, resting it on Wheeljacks arm, almost as if he was afraid the other mech was going to disappear, as he tugged the engineer out of the lab with one last glance at the silent project. “Better than I was a moment ago.”


End file.
